What do I do if my distributors refuse to sell my non-compliant products despite having bought them from me well ahead of the July 1st 2006 deadline?
Your distributor may have made a business decision to sell only RoHS-compliant products from July 1st (or even earlier). There is not much that you can do about this. But it may be the case that your distributor/re-seller doesn’t know that it is legal to sell non-compliant products after July 1st as long as they have been purchased in Europe before that date. In that case, you might be able to educate the distributor/re-seller by referring them to the European Commission’s interpretation of “put on the market”, and, perhaps more importantly, the interpretation used by the relevant EU country in its legislation implementing RoHS. This can be in the form of guidance published on the government’s website or the enforcement authority’s website, or a letter from the government or the RoHS enforcement authority. If you need to ask for a letter, you should ask that the government or the enforcement authority confirm that they are following the European Commission’s interpretation of “put on t
